Even
then, Irving had come to court claiming that he was
no denier but simply a dissident historian who
quibbled over minutiae. But under forensic
cross-examination from Professor Lipstadt's QC,
Richard Rampton, right, Irving's case
unravelled.

At one point, Mr Rampton recalled a speech given
by Irving in 1991 on the publication of his revised
book, Hitler's
War, in which he had boasted: "You will not
find the Holocaust mentioned in one line, not even
a footnote. Why should we? If something didn't
happen, then you don't even dignify it with a
footnote."

At his trial, Irving
conceded that
"certainly more than a million, certainly less than
four million" Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.
But he also referred to the gas chambers as
an invention of "British propaganda" and
refused to accept that there had been a planned
mass extermination programme at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"You have come to believe that the Nazis
did not use gas chambers for the extermination of
Jews -- let alone millions of Jews?" Mr Rampton
asked.

Irving replied: "Yes, I have become very
sceptical of that element of the story."

While it was likely that there had been "some
kind of gassing" at Birkenau, Irving told the
judge, it was on an experimental basis.

When confronted with evidence that traces of
cyanide had been found in ventilator grating taken
from a crematorium at the camp, Irving argued that
the particular room had been used as a "gassing
cellar for fumigating objects or cadavers".

A year later, in answer
to an inquiry from a schoolgirl, Irving said:
"Lots of Jews were killed. In wartime lots of
people get killed -- see Iraq -- sometimes the
ones who were guilty for the war, sometimes the
innocent. See
the air raid on
Dresden. That was a
holocaust. I am on the side of the
innocents."

In his account of his visit to Poland in March
this year, Irving refers to the "alleged gas
chambers or chamber" at Treblinka and "the alleged
gas chamber" at Majdanek.

Auschwitz
fakery

One
of the fake watch towers installed by the
Polish authorities; see enlargement
also

The
crematorium at Auschwitz I, "rebuilt" in
1948: the chimney is not even connected to
the building, there are no stains, and the
doors don't fit.

At the site of the small crematorium at Auschwitz,
he writes: "I famously once said in Canada that
more women died on the back seat of Senator Edward
Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than were ever
gassed in that building."

In fact, a videotaped version of the remark was
produced at the libel trial, where Irving had
alluded not to the particular building, but "the
gas chambers of Auschwitz".

Click on the link and you come to a video by an
unidentified maker that proclaims itself: "A
holocaust denial movie, in 30 episodes, on the
subject of Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec."

An excerpt from one episode says: "This young
black man might be thinking that the slavery that
happened to his ancestors is nothing compared to
the holocaust. Except what happened to his
ancestors really happened."